Communist Poetry

Army ads looked cool-I signed right up
Besides, it was the only way could find a job
"Great place to start" and see the world
Womanize at discos
And fake going nuts
To scam infirmary drugs

So send in the clowns
The NATO circus is here to protect you
Your choice must be ours
Yankee corruption
Or the big bad Soviet threat

Don't you feel secure
Sending our Top Guns guard your sky
Flying their fighter planes upside down
Stoned out of their minds

For a real hot time
How 'bout an air show crash?
Or a G.I. riding a stolen tank
Through downtown Manhattan
And off the riverbank
Where he drowns

Fall in with the clowns
Remember-
NATO is here to protect you
With nuclear bombs
That come to visit
And decided to stay

[Chorus:]
Attack!
Attack!
Of the peacekeepers
Attack!

The charge of the joke brigade
In charge
We can blow up the world
More times than you

We'll show 'em
We'll show 'em
With radioactive subs

We'll show 'em
We'll show 'em
With missiles in your back yard

Guarded
By soldiers
On acid during night watch
And generals who care only
For fat pensions and bribes

If that don't scare the commies nothing will
Cept maybe our Bradley tanks tripping over themselves
Both powers have one goal in common
to keep Germany divided
Never strong enough to start another world war

Occupied by the clowns
Is it really you NATO is here to protect?
With Berlin type walls
When they came to visit
We all decided to stay

It doesn’t matter how much you ask
I won’t blow you wearing a Corbyn mask
You can plead and you can beg
I won’t fuck you in no Corbyn drag
Even if you sob with mournful cries
I won’t put on that Corbyn disguise
I know that you want Jezza’s jizzum
Even more than you want anarchism
But don’t you worry, here’s some news that’s great
Jezza lusts after your virgin prostate

My dog has died.
I buried him in the garden
next to a rusted old machine.

Some day I'll join him right there,
but now he's gone with his shaggy coat,
his bad manners and his cold nose,
and I, the materialist, who never believed
in any promised heaven in the sky
for any human being,
I believe in a heaven I'll never enter.
Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom
where my dog waits for my arrival
waving his fan-like tail in friendship.

Ai, I'll not speak of sadness here on earth,
of having lost a companion
who was never servile.
His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine
withholding its authority,
was the friendship of a star, aloof,
with no more intimacy than was called for,
with no exaggerations:
he never climbed all over my clothes
filling me full of his hair or his mange,
he never rubbed up against my knee
like other dogs obsessed with sex.

No, my dog used to gaze at me,
paying me the attention I need,
the attention required
to make a vain person like me understand
that, being a dog, he was wasting time,
but, with those eyes so much purer than mine,
he'd keep on gazing at me
with a look that reserved for me alone
all his sweet and shaggy life,
always near me, never troubling me,
and asking nothing.

Ai, how many times have I envied his tail
as we walked together on the shores of the sea
in the lonely winter of Isla Negra
where the wintering birds filled the sky
and my hairy dog was jumping about
full of the voltage of the sea's movement:
my wandering dog, sniffing away
with his golden tail held high,
face to face with the ocean's spray.

Joyful, joyful, joyful,
as only dogs know how to be happy
with only the autonomy
of their shameless spirit.

There are no good-byes for my dog who has died,
and we don't now and never did lie to each other.

Within
The linear magic moving from miracle to inevitable
Sacred, not to be touched
Nobody's fucking business
To be left to fulfill itself
Right?

But no
Once again the monster perverts reality
Usurps nature
Makes reason unreasonable
Makes the unreasonable essential
What shit is this? What the fuck?
But yes, we will act out perversion to end the perversion
We will become rapists to end rape
This is a false fate that we cannot disgard
And we will live with it
Our new world will live with it
A glorious stain that will simultaneously fill our hearts with joy and break them in two
And as it draws its final breath the monster will puke out its last laugh, it's final heal grind on the face of humanity
But ha! It's dark energy could never understand our ability to live on light
We may take time to cleanse its stench from our souls but one day we will
Oh yes, our emancipation will be made whole and the monster will cease to have ever existed!
Ideology will die
It only exists when there is another to oppose
And then our freedom will at once justify and ensure that our perversion never happened
We will never see it
But we are it and it is us
That is so beautiful
Really very beautiful

Within
The linear magic moving from miracle to inevitable
Sacred, not to be touched
Nobody's fucking business
To be left to fulfill itself
Right?

But no
Once again the monster perverts reality
Usurps nature
Makes reason unreasonable
Makes the unreasonable essential
What shit is this? What the fuck?
But yes, we will act out perversion to end the perversion
We will become rapists to end rape
This is a false fate that we cannot disgard
And we will live with it
Our new world will live with it
A glorious stain that will simultaneously fill our hearts with joy and break them in two
And as it draws its final breath the monster will puke out its last laugh, it's final heal grind on the face of humanity
But ha! It's dark energy could never understand our ability to live on light
We may take time to cleanse its stench from our souls but one day we will
Oh yes, our emancipation will be made whole and the monster will cease to have ever existed!
Ideology will die
It only exists when there is another to oppose
And then our freedom will at once justify and ensure that our perversion never happened
We will never see it
But we are it and it is us
That is so beautiful
Really very beautiful

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thy happiness,---
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

O for a draught of vintage, that hath been
Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provencal song, and sun-burnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;
Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new love pine at them beyond tomorrow.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Clustered around by all her starry fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast-fading violets covered up in leaves;
And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

Darkling I listen; and for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain---
To thy high requiem become a sod

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:---do I wake or sleep?

Cat! who has pass'd thy grand climacteric,
How many mice and rats hast in thy days
Destroy'd? How many tit-bits stolen? Gaze
With those bright languid segments green, and
prick
Those velvet ears - but prythee do not stick
Thy latent talons in me - and tell me all thy frays,
Of fish and mice, and rats and tender chick;
Nay, look not down, nor lick thy dainty wrists, -
For all the wheezy asthma - and for all
Thy tail's tip is nick'd off - and though the fists
Of many a maid have given thee many a maul,
Still is thy fur as when the lists
In youth thou enter'dst on glass-bottled wall.

This is more like fascist poetry when you consider who wrote it but anyhow. . .

This Be The Verse by Philip Larkin

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

This is one of my favorites from Larkin. It would be unreasonable to toss Larkin's literary contributions out the window just because of his personal failings. The same holds true with Proudhon and Bakunin whose personal failings weren't even part of their political writings nor have any relevance when people invoke them today; one would have to read them of course to know that, however.

This machine traverses the world
Blind, deaf, stupid
No care for the destruction in it's wake
It just rolls on, devouring all
Spitting out the bones
Our bones
It's fuel is reason, beauty, possibility
And from its exhaust spews isolation, pain, confusion and hopelessness
There are no winners, no one and nothing is safe
This machine, capitalism, like a stinking putrid soulless animal
Eternally ravaged by an insatiable hunger will never stop
And all the while, men and women feel the sharp horror of separation from how it could be
Should be
Like tiny amoeba, alone in a vast empty universe
We stand, transfixed in it's dark light
Made to feel to blame for our inability to live in these unnatural hellish conditions that this animal subjects us to
Made to feel inadequate
Made to feel fear
So saturated by the blood of this thing that we cling on to it, worship it, and spend our lives feeding it
This creature must be slain if we are to feel joy in our species
To realise the possibilities that we hold
To not be alone anymore
For this is the true crime committed by this machine, this animal, this capitalism
It separates us and puts us into our most unnatural state
Alone
We starve in a world of plenty
We freeze under a hot sun
We are imprisoned by limits in a limitless world
All this because we are forced to be alone
Alone
Alone...

I watch vaudeville. Two Swiss women whose bodies are perfect
Throw their legs and shoulders among trapezes and flying
rings, a cross-play of flesh tights (and what are the babies
doing since Russian and Austrian soldiers killed all the cows
in Galicia?)

I watch vaudeville. A clown acrobat with a red mouth slashed
on a death-white face tickles us all with mock danger and
mock pain; he does handsprings on top of three tables
pyramided and he double-somersaults from flimsy ladder
(and how long will the Crown Prince batter Joffre at Verdun
and how long will French and Prussians cut each other, faces
and guts, in the trenches and tunnels – and how long will the
toy carvers of one nation drive their bayonets into the necks
of toy carvers of another nation?)

I watch vaudeville. O we all watch vaudeville. And the Swiss
women might carry beautiful children in pockets of flesh, in
lovely red tissues where children hide. And the French clown
acrobat with the red mouth slashed on a death-white face,
maybe he has a cousin at Verdun, a cousin with an ear off
and two ribs gone.

I watch vaudeville. O we all watch vaudeville. And the Crown
Prince and Joffre over their breakfasts ask how the weather
looks for new troop movements.

Probably an ill-timed attempt to contribute to this thread, but I thought this work ("Ozymandias") had an anti-authoritarian feel to it (the irrelevance of the greatness of the king with the passing of time) and wanted to share (it's apparently a popular poem and there's an adjective, ozymandian, based off it). The familial background of the author, Percy Shelley, is also interesting. For those who don't know Shelley was the partner of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus. The latter was daughter of early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and political thinker William Godwin, both of whom were influential among later anarchists.

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

On revolutionary violence. God knows what trip the author was on when he wrote this!

Within
The linear magic moving from miracle to inevitable
Sacred, not to be touched
Nobody's fucking business
To be left to fulfill itself
Right?

But no
Once again the monster perverts reality
Usurps nature
Makes reason unreasonable
Makes the unreasonable essential
What shit is this? What the fuck?
But yes, we will act out perversion to end the perversion
We will become rapists to end rape
This is a false fate that we cannot disgard
And we will live with it
Our new world will live with it
A glorious stain that will simultaneously fill our hearts with joy and break them in two
And as it draws its final breath the monster will puke out its last laugh, it's final heal grind on the face of humanity
But ha! It's dark energy could never understand our ability to live on light
We may take time to cleanse its stench from our souls but one day we will
Oh yes, our emancipation will be made whole and the monster will cease to have ever existed!
Ideology will die
It only exists when there is another to oppose
And then our freedom will at once justify and ensure that our perversion never happened
We will never see it
But we are it and it is us
That is so beautiful
Really very beautiful

6am. I leave the hotel and head for the sea. Through the lanes of Indy stores. Hipness, hip, vegan shoes, coffee. Oh how they love their coffee. The cool people, the beautiful people, putting out signs, chairs, tables. Intentionally shabby, beautifully fucked up. Magnets to the wallets of the aesthetes that populate this city. Cold hard commerce softened by the aesthetic. Shielded from view, yet still quietly growling away. The hungry beast.
The gulls scream as I close in on the beach. And they may well scream! For if they can see what I can see, feel what I can feel, to scream is the natural thing to do! Littered along these streets, in doorways, on benches, they would see the helpless, homeless young. The abandoned youth, with their blankets, their bags and their bottles. Mournful dejected faces, horror struck at the realisation of their reality as they wake to another day of desperation, deprivation, degradation, and desolation.
In a city full of empty hotel rooms, holiday lets and magnificent town houses big enough for five, six, seven families, a city full of soft warm and empty beds, they sleep outside on cold hard stone. A city full of restaurants, in turn full of delicious nutritious food, yet they beg for scraps. And here I am, full of fear of my financial future, yet so grateful to know I will sleep in a warm comfortable house tonight, a warm comfortable bed, with a belly full of food. I see a face, so young, so sad, so bereft of hope, and my spree begins - five pounds, ten pounds, twenty pounds, each new face peering out from a doorway triggers an automatic action, the note is handed over almost as if I have no say in the matter. The final note in my wallet, ten pounds, says goodbye to my touch. Ninety five pounds closer to ruin, I keep walking, and now, face after face after face and I can do nothing for them. Have I really done anything for anyone but myself? Feed the poor? Maybe that should read ‘feed my conscience’?
If this was nature, if this was just an inevitable reality, I could accept it. I could accept that life is necessarily shit, and I could go about my miserable business, until the day I am relieved forever of my misery. But no! This is not nature, this is not inevitable. This is a perversion. This is nature denied. And so I cannot accept this. I will not! And so now, for me it is another day of longing. Longing for the world I know can exist, must exist. Another day of doing my pitifully small part in trying to make that world a reality, and today that will have to be enough.

Littered along these streets, in doorways, on benches, they would see the helpless, homeless young. The abandoned youth, with their blankets, their bags and their bottles. Mournful dejected faces, horror struck at the realisation of their reality as they wake to another day of desperation, deprivation, degradation, and desolation.

Sounds like Blake's "London" there:

I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear

How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls

But most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse

I think all of the critical Great War poets maybe deserve an honorable mention (obviously being anti-a-war doesn't translate to communist; could maybe read Marx's sonnets to Jenny if you want proper communist poetry), Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and others. Owen also wrote "Miners" as a response to the Minnie Pit Disaster.

"They" by Sassoon

Quote:

The Bishop tells us: 'When the boys come back
'They will not be the same; for they'll have fought
'In a just cause: they lead the last attack
'On Anti-Christ; their comrades' blood has bought
'New right to breed an honourable race,
'They have challenged Death and dared him face to face.'

'We're none of us the same!' the boys reply.
'For George lost both his legs; and Bill's stone blind;
'Poor Jim's shot through the lungs and like to die;
'And Bert's gone syphilitic: you'll not find
'A chap who's served that hasn't found some change.
' And the Bishop said: 'The ways of God are strange!'

I thought Owen's "Dulce et Decorum est", the full expression meaning "how sweet and fitting it is to die for one's country", sounded relevant to today with the push to "get people back to work", especially if you replace the last bit with something like "our gains", if that's not too much of a stretch. I think the propaganda and celebration of labor, similar to the propaganda and celebration of dying in the ruling class's wars, is a kind of "old lie" disguising capitalist lust for profit. Haven't read much from Owen but I'd be curious about what his views on the "the truth" were.

Something that people outside the UK might not be aware of is that that a) May Day is sort-of an official holiday here, although they moved it to "the first Monday in May" rather than the actual day in an attempt to sever it from its meaning, and b) this year the government have moved the holiday to be Friday 8th instead, as a commemoration of VE Day, because even the watered-down not-on-May-1st version of May Day was too much to be allowed. Of course, as it turns out May Day this year was never going to be spectacular anyway, but the whole thing is a yet another reminder of how much our rulers are still reliant on endless repetition of "that old lie".

If it's of any interest, Pankhurst includes Sassoon's letter declining to return to duty on the front page of the July 28th edition of the Workers' Dreadnought (also the date when the paper changed from the Woman's Dreadnought) under the heading "Soldier Learns the Truth" and later included some of Sassoon's works from the "The Old Huntsman" in the August 11th edition.

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